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Vivo, Oppo’s new flagship smartphones look like the iPhone X but at a third of the price

The identical-looking iPhone X features on the new handsets from Vivo and Oppo have emerged amid efforts by Huawei, China’s largest smartphone brand, to shed the copycat image of mainland mobile phone makers

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Chinese smartphone supplier Vivo’s new flagship device, the X21, was launched on Monday in Wuzhen, a city in the eastern coastal province of Zhejiang. Photo: Handout
Iris DengandLi Tao

Wait, is that a red iPhone X?

The latest smartphones released in China may prompt people to do a double take, wondering whether new colours for Apple’s iPhone X have surfaced.

Chinese smartphone suppliers Vivo and Oppo have separately introduced their new flagship Android smartphone models, each of which feature a notch at the top of the touch screen identical to the prominent design cue on the tenth anniversary iPhone.

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Prices for Vivo’s X21 and Oppo’s R15 start at 2,898 yuan (US$457) and 2,999 yuan, respectively. Each model costs around a third of what an iPhone X sells for, which is from 8,388 yuan.

The new products from Vivo and Oppo – companies owned by privately held BBK Electronics based in the southern coastal port city of Guangzhou, northwest of Hong Kong – show how the Chinese makers of low-priced Android smartphones continue to follow the design of more expensive devices from the likes of Apple and Samsung Electronics. 

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